Receiving Non ASCII Characters in UTF-8 Encoding

PHP Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟Receiving Non-ASCII Characters from Input Forms

∟Receiving Non ASCII Characters in UTF-8 Encoding

This section provides a tutorial example on how enter non-ASCII characters in HTML forms and receive them correctly with the GET method. The HTML form is using the Unicode UTF-8 encoding.

In the previous scripts, "charset=iso-8859-1" is used for the input page. Now let's play with "charset=utf-8". Here is my sample script:

<?php
#  InputUtf8Get.php
#- Copyright 2009 (c) HerongYang.com. All Rights Reserved.
#
#- Promoting CGI values to local variables
   global $r_English, $r_Spanish, $r_Korean, $r_ChineseUtf8;
   global $r_ChineseGb2312;
   import_request_variables("GPC","r_");

#- Generating HTML document
   print("<html>");
   print('<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"'
      .' content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>');
   print("<body>\n");
   print("<form action=InputUtf8Get.php method=get>");
   print("English ASCII: <input name=English"
      ." value='$r_English' size=16><br>\n");
   print("Spanish UTF-8: <input name=Spanish"
      ." value='$r_Spanish' size=16><br>\n");
   print("Korean UTF-8: <input name=Korean"
      ." value='$r_Korean' size=16><br>\n");
   print("Chinese UTF-8: <input name=ChineseUtf8"
      ." value='$r_ChineseUtf8' size=16><br>\n");
   print("Chinese GB2312: <input name=ChineseGb2312"
      ." value='$r_ChineseGb2312' size=16><br>\n");
   print("<input type=submit name=submit value=Submit>\n");
   print("</form>\n");

#- Outputing input strings back to HTML document
   print("<hr>");
   print("<pre>");
   foreach ($_GET as $k => $v) {
      print "$k = ($v)\n";
   }
   print("</pre>");
   print("</body>");
   print("</html>");

#- Dumping input strings to a file
   $file = fopen("\\temp\\InputUtf8Get.txt", 'ab');
   $str = "------\n";
   fwrite($file, $str, strlen($str));
   if (array_key_exists('QUERY_STRING',$_SERVER)) {
      $str = $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'];
   } else {
      $str = NULL;
   }
   fwrite($file, $str, strlen($str));

   $str = "------\n";
   fwrite($file, $str, strlen($str));
   foreach ($_REQUEST as $k => $v) {
      $str = "$k = ($v)\n";
      fwrite($file, $str, strlen($str));
   }
   fclose($file);
?>

If you enter the same input strings as in the previous tests:

English = (Hello world!)
Spanish = (¡Hola mundo!)
Korean = (여보세요 세계 !)
ChineseUtf8 = (你好世界!)
ChineseGb2312 = (????!)
submit = (Submit)

The page returned with the input strings displayed below the form. They look correct to me.

If you open the dump file, \temp\InputUtf8Get.txt, you will see how input strings are URL encoded in query string, and decoded in $_REQUEST.

------
English=Hello+world%21&
Spanish=%C2%A1Hola+mundo%21&
Korean=%EC%97%AC%EB%B3%B4%EC%84%B8%EC%9A%94+%EC%84%B8%EA%B3%84+%21&
ChineseUtf8=%E4%BD%A0%E5%A5%BD%E4%B8%96%E7%95%8C%21&
ChineseGb2312=%C3%8A%C3%80%C2%BD%C3%A7%C3%84%C3%A3%C2%BA%C3%83%C2%A3
   %C2%A1
&submit=Submit------
------
English = (Hello world!)
Spanish = (¡Hola mundo!)
Korean = (여보세요 세계 !)
ChineseUtf8 = (你好世界!)
ChineseGb2312 = (????!)
submit = (Submit)

Again, the result matches the rules listed earlier in this chapter. Input strings are recorded as UTF-8 byte sequences when entered on the page. Then each byte is URL encoded as %xx when sending to the server. When input strings are parsed into $_REQUEST, they are decoded back to UTF-8 byte sequences.